The forums here at blender.org are for the development of Blender itself.

Examples include but are not limited to...
"Function xxxx does not work when..."
"Is anyone working on functionality for xxxx hardware/software..."
"I have a patch for xxxx, can someone test it?"
"Blender crashes when I attempt to xxxx. {trace}"
etc...

Examples include but are not limited to...
"How do I xxxx in Blender?"
"Why does tutorial xxxx not work when..."
"What am I doing wrong? {IMAGE}"
"Check out my awesome... {IMAGE}"
etc..

The reasons for separating the forums are two-fold.

First, questions on usage are going to get a much larger audience of Blender users who may be experiencing or have experienced the same thing on BlenderArtists than here.
Second, developers do not have to wade through all of the non-development topics to find the topics that they can deal with.

Gather round, my children, and Uncle Stiv will tell you a story of when the world was new - so new, in fact, that Blender still fit on a floppy disk. (ask your Mom what a floppy disk is) Back then, the blender.org forums were *the* place to talk about Blender - anything about Blender.

But the world has changed. Over time, a user community grew up at Elysium, which became BlenderArtists.org. Blender development has developed (heh!) to the point where we have a new release every two months. To support this pace, most development talk takes place on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and the development mailing list, with the wiki being used for proposals and documentation.

The development forums have been left in the dust and have turned into a hodge-podge of user questions and actual development topics. A suggestion was made to drop these forums entirely, but I think they still have value as a low-bandwidth interface for those who may not have access or time for IRC.

Basically, the plan is to chase user questions over to blenderartists.org and condense the development forums down into just a handful of topics. Something along the lines of:

Currently, user questions are being moved into the User Questions that really belong on blenderartists.org category. It's nothing personal. No one is being singled out for posting in the wrong topic. No blame! It is just a (belated) effort to bring a little order to the world. Did I mention it's nothing personal?

(tl;dr) The Bottom Line :

For Discussion and questions about *using* Blender:

* the user forums at blenderartists.org

For Development discussion and questions:

* The #blendercoders channel on freenode.net . A good place to get quick help with compile problems. Most active during the day, euro-time

* There is a weekly developer meeting in #blendercoders every Sunday at 16h Amsterdam time. Be forewarned - meeting time is for decisions, not discussions and questions. We have an agenda and we stick to it. However, before and after the meeting is a good time for discussions, questions and help because everyone is around.